Twelve years ago, Hal Riney defined Saturn. The San Francisco advertising star created an automotive aura and wrote a tag line that in 1990 largely created the brand: "A different kind of company. A different kind of car."

It was folksy, graceful image-making, and while Saturn at the time was a wholly owned subsidiary of GM, the advertising and marketing described a car and culture free of big automaker baggage.

But selling cars is business, and Riney may not be Saturn's agency of the future.

Next year, Saturn will launch a small car, the Ion, targeting under-40 consumers. There's a lot riding on the launch, so Saturn this week is holding a competition for five advertising agencies presenting their pitches for the Ion account.

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One of them is Riney, now known as Publicis & Hal Riney, defending what has been an anchor account. Another is a crosstown rival, Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The Ion account will bring between $30 million and $50 million in annual billings, but it is said in the advertising industry that the winner will almost certainly get the full $300 million Saturn account.

"The Hal Riney agency became our communications partner, and they were just brilliant thinkers in terms of the strategy we were pursuing," said Tom Shaver,

Saturn's first director of consumer marketing.

"They said we were not just another car division, and I think that was absolutely the correct focus at the time," said Shaver, who left Saturn in 1992 and is now a senior partner at J.D. Power and Associates in Agoura Hills (Los Angeles County).

"I was disappointed they were doing a search for an ad agency, because we always talked about the long term," Shaver added. "But people change."

The Saturn plant is in historic countryside, not far from the Spring Hill Battlefield, where the Army of Tennessee clashed with the 103rd Ohio and other federal forces on Nov. 29, 1864. By design, that is far removed from a Michigan assembly line milieu. Teams of workers, Japanese style, build the cars.

Riney's cameras made the old battlefield 30 miles south of Nashville a pretty picture where all is well. He even made a short advertising film about the place called "Spring, in Spring Hill."

"What Hal Riney created for Saturn was one of the greatest ad campaigns ever conceived," said Bob Garfield, a critic at Advertising Age. "That campaign established Saturn not just as a brand of cars but as a community of consumers, manufacturer and retailer who together were engaged in some sort of reinvention of the car business."

"People bought into it," he added. "Saturn owners were not just making a purchase. It was approaching a way of life."

Executives at Publicis & Hal Riney did not return calls. It has been reported that Riney, now semiretired, has worked daily for several months on the pitch he is making this week to Saturn. Goodby Silverstein had no comment, nor did the other three agencies in the competition: D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles of Troy, Mich., and New York; McCann-Erickson Worldwide of New York; and Wieden + Kennedy of Portland, Ore.

In 1990, the thinking was that Saturn would appeal to consumers who had lost interest in domestic cars. With sales techniques like no-haggle pricing, GM believed Saturn would challenge Japanese and German imports.

But as the years passed, GM did not help Saturn develop new models to keep it attractive, said Shaver, "and that has been a real issue from the retailer side of the business." Saturn had no sport utility vehicle until introducing the Vue, and it had no pickup or van like other models. "There was no product an enthusiast of Saturn could move up to and stay with the brand," he said.

Also, in recent years Saturn was brought directly into the GM fold and lost some of its outsider identity, although the Saturn Web site still touts a "different kind of company" that has sold 2.2 million cars. Saturn thinks the Ion, to debut in fall 2003, is its car of the future.

"It's a contemporary looking vehicle that offers young buyers a great deal of functionality," said Mike Gardner, a Saturn spokesman in Detroit. "The vehicle will reflect the owner's personality -- owners can accessorize it."

He said of the advertising competition, "We're getting ready to launch a very important product, and from time to time we want to check to see that we are doing the best thing possible. That is the motivation."

Gardner said that 10 agencies were invited to present their credentials to Saturn. That group was winnowed to five. The company plans to pick an agency for the Ion sometime in the first quarter. The decision will be made by Jill Lajdziak, a vice president of sales, service and marketing at Saturn, along with a team of associates.